cherry

Some time ago on Facebook, several posters ended up chatting about the vocabulary for talking about a gay man’s anal virginity. The term cherry plays a central role in this vocabulary domain — taken over, like some other sexual vocabulary, from reference to women and their sexuality.

We start with women. In Green’s Dictionary of Slang, it begins with the cherry as an image of ripeness, with two related subsenses (both originally U.S.), with the second as an extension of the first:

plus the very common pop and bust someone’s cherry, with a vivid allusion to breaking the hymen.

Now the anus has no real analogue to the hymen, but the ‘viriginity’ subsense can be transferred to anal intercourse, giving the full range of possessive collocations as above, but now used of gay men rather than women.

Back to vaginal intercourse, with another sense of the noun cherry, referring to a person rather than virginity: